Forum:Organization and Navigation of this wiki
Is it easy to find what you are looking for? Wiki's grow like topsy. No other way with so many authors. This leaves the question of how should things link together? Wikia does an interesting job of suggesting other pages to look at in the same category. That is good for casual browsing. The problem comes when you come to the wiki wanting to find something specific. Also when you do, how do find all the articles that might be associated? Main pages can only carry canonical information. When m''' was around she insisted the speculation should be linked from the "Mad" page. Also that the "Mad" pages be used for organized theories. Of course those using the site have take "Mad" to mean an excuse to argue like sparks about anything. Which '''m would have insisted belong in forums. Which they are all over the internet. Lj has an offical GirlGenius site that contains page by page discussions with often good insights by corgi. User:PersephoneKore, stalkingheron, tomsmith and others. TV tropes has a girl genius forum of over 10000 posts. The Giant has several threads dedicate to talking about Girl Genius. Girl Genius has gotten so big that the Foglio's have constant problems. Mostly keeping goods in stock. As Phil posts Beautiful, beautiful problems. Which is to say GG is suffering from more success than everyone has imagined. The wiki has a lesser success. I am wondering if there are simple things we can do to make it more useful to the vast number of present and future fans of GG. My main beef in editing is I write until I get to someones name I can't quite remember how to spell or link to. Then how do I find it? Usually it take me a while and quite a few guesses to find the name. If I am lucky spelling the first few letters of the name will get the wikia to present a list that includes it. But if I am thinking about the important parts of the name I might miss the Proffessor or Doctor that come in front of it. Places are even worse. The current suggestive menus don't seem to be of much practical use. Why is that? The point of all this is that this is a wiki. If things aren't right they can be fixed. Here is a good place to suggest how?! How?! *Structuring Main pages to have associated Forums and Mad pages automatically. *Hinting with boilerplate templates how things are supposed to be used. Then making liberal use of the templates. *Rethinking a navigation/menu structure and revising the menus to live within the limitation of the current wiki format. *Other things that haven't be thought of yet. Please add thoughts and suggestions. --Rej ¤¤? 21:57, March 5, 2011 (UTC); : I'm not sure that "lesser" is the right word for the success of this wiki. The forums are similar to other places on the net, but the non-forum features are unique. I don't know of any other source for the information, and I see links to the wiki when I read other forums. There hasn't been a huge amount of editing, but that's because the basics are well covered -- there aren't large numbers of new characters to add. : Comments on some of the issues you raise: :* "the question of how should things link together": Link everything. If you have text in an article that is the name of another article, make it a link. (In the past, when I had more time, I would just keep clicking "random page" and see what links I could add.) :* Misspellings are a hard problem to solve. If you don't know the first few letters of a name there's no trivial way to find the page. It is possible to search ("green hair") or look in the categories. :* Extra or missing "Professor" prefix: Add the variant forms as redirects to the primary page. :* I don't know what you mean by "places are worse". Could you give examples? : As for the larger question of navigation, what do you want the navigation to accomplish? I don't have a problem with it, I get what I want from the current nav and searches. We can add to it or change it, but we need specific goals or use cases so we can tell if a change improves the situation. Argadi 18:55, March 6, 2011 (UTC) :: Yah. Goals is first. Actually maybe goals is second. First is a dissatisfaction with the current state of affairs. Searches work pretty well. The navigation bar lost some of its usefulness in the format change. To wit all the sub-sub menus now no longer appear. The question is what can/should the navigation bar be used for? I haven't gotten a good idea about it yet. We could make the lists longer and flatter. It would possibly be nice if the navigation bar would pop up a page wide menu with many columns like the wikia site menu does. More columns would allow each bar item to present more choices. We seem to be limited to 4 right now. So part of the research is to find out what the limits are. I am also soliciting ideas for what a good goal for navigation of the sight would be. Usually to find goals you need to start with values. Basically if I am interested in one thing then I want to find all the information that links with that one thing. The big things here are the villains. Lots of different pages have been written about Lucrezia and Zola. Can all of them be found from the Main page for those characters? Similarly for other characters who have generated lots of interest over time. For me these thoughts are on a back burner because there is enough regular work on my plate to keep me mostly busy. Still I want to start thinking about this untouched stuff. I think the editors who used to think about this are also ones who have drifted on to other arenas and interests. We have attracted new editors but I don't thing anyone has engaged themselves in thinking about the site as a whole. This is an invitation for them (and us two) to do so. --Rej ¤¤? 21:55, March 13, 2011 (UTC) : One possible approach: Add a bright box at the top of each page with a link to a survey. Ask questions like "why did you come to the site today?", "did you find what you were looking for?", "what was helpful about the navigation?", "what was confusing about the navigation?", "what did you want to find that you didn't find?" and accumulate use cases for the navigation from those comments. (Those questions are off the top of my head — if we take this approach we should discuss the questions in a forum before posting. I've seen more bad surveys than good surveys and it's hard to come up with a good set of questions.) Argadi 23:19, March 13, 2011 (UTC)